Uncommon for a Straight Boy to Quote Butler the Way You Do, or Where Should I Speak My Feminism?

This chapter is an autobiographical enterprise that outlines my recollection of some events that marked my feminist becoming. Most of these events took place during my tenure as an Early Stage Researcher for the GRACE project. Through the lens of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, I reflect on how my straight and male body arrived to inhabit feminist spaces, how conducting feminist research (re)oriented my embodied subjectivity, how my embodied presence (re)oriented the feminist spaces in which I happened to dwell, and the implications that these (re)orientations have for thinking of myself as ‘some body’ that has a place within feminism. In other words, I reflect on the work that being involved in feminist research perform on male bodies such as mine and, in turn, the work that the bodies of male researchers perform on feminist spaces. Based on these considerations, I draw some tentative conclusion on the viability of men as subjects of feminism. Foregrounding the lens of space, I further conclude that it is worth taking into serious consideration the political potential of performing a pro-feminist masculinity in not-explicitly-feminist spaces.